Those damn hand models
October 14th 2012
Scale is everything when it comes to how a particular ring design will look on your hand. For example the smaller the finger size of a 1 carat solitaire ring the bigger the diamond will look in a photo. Years ago when the smallest mobile phones were the best (remember those days?) advertisers used large hand models to make the phones look smaller.
In the picture below you can see the same size diamond in a photo edited to show a ring design in sizes H and Q. Without knowing the difference in finger sizes you would assume that they are both the same finger size and that one of the diamonds was smaller than the other and the band also narrower.
Recently I have been asked to make two quite simple designs but the customers wanted the rings to look exactly like photos they had seen and the above problem has occurred with both. If a customer is looking at a photo of a ring made to a different finger size to theirs it will not look the same even if the diamond size is the same.
Differences might be slight but customers need to be aware of them before I make a ring for them. This is where the beauty of being able to edit graphics comes in.
When a customer comes to me I can measure their finger size and the size of the diamond/gems to be used. From there I can edit up an image of the design to show the changes in appearance that will occur as a result of using the different gem sizes to a different finger size, just like the image above.
It is at this stage that decisions can be made to vary other features of the design, such as the width of the band, to make it closest to the original design or even in some case improve on the original. In the situation where we cannot get the design to look how the customer wants it to, no matter what changes we make, we consider making something else.
The ring pictured below is one of the completed rings I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It is the result of many graphics used to consider options and then a silver draft to confirm the final design.
The diamond is a 1 carat D colour marquise cut set into an 18ct yellow gold setting. The diamond is literally suspended in a hammer set bezel mounted to the top of the ring shoulders.
